Mathematics for the interested outsider

Smooth Dependence on Initial Conditions

Now that we’ve got the existence and uniqueness of our solutions down, we have one more of our promised results: the smooth dependence of solutions on initial conditions. That is, if we use our existence and uniqueness theorems to construct a unique “flow” function satisfying

by setting — where is the unique solution with initial condition — then is continuously differentiable.

Now, we already know that is continuously differentiable in the time direction by definition. What we need to show is that the directional derivatives involving directions in exist and are continuous. To that end, let be a base point and be a small enough displacement that as well. Similarly, let be a fixed point in time and let be a small change in time

But now our result from last time tells us that these solutions can diverge no faster than exponentially. Thus we conclude that

and so as this term must go to zero as well. Meanwhile, the second term also goes to zero by the differentiability of . We can now see that the directional derivative at in the direction of exists.

But are these directional derivatives continuous. This turns out to be a lot more messy, but essentially doable by similar methods and a generalization of Gronwall’s inequality. For the sake of getting back to differential equations I’m going to just assert that not only do all directional derivatives exist, but they’re continuous, and thus the flow is .

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This is mainly an expository blath, with occasional high-level excursions, humorous observations, rants, and musings. The main-line exposition should be accessible to the “Generally Interested Lay Audience”, as long as you trace the links back towards the basics. Check the sidebar for specific topics (under “Categories”).

I’m in the process of tweaking some aspects of the site to make it easier to refer back to older topics, so try to make the best of it for now.